I wanted to write an interesting piece of code so I did partially. An asynchronous website crawler! It isn’t very useful though, I don’t think Google engineers will be interested even if it makes lovely fart sounds, which it doesn’t.

TLDR; I don’t find this method very useful for things like crawling websites, especially there is no single point of data exchange, however it looks very useful for not sequence-sensitive activities. The call itself is simple enough to understand and apply to your codebase though.

Here it is: the shiny HttpClient::sendAsync method! This time I am going to crawl my girlfriend’s blog about having cats at home, which I guess it’s worth to check out if you have a nasty fur ball already or going to have one. It’s polish language only, but for God sake, can’t you use Google translator? I am writing this blog with its help all the time. You’re welcome :).

There are a lot of crap flying around about the Bitcoin. Is it going to crush down? Is it worthless? Why did prices go down? Hell I know! Maybe people just found out “cryptocurrency” doesn’t mean “privacy” and all history of transactions are public and it’s matter of time to find out who did which transaction? Who knows… Don’t even ask me these questions, Bitcoin is a nice introduction to the thriving market of numbers aka fintech. But, what I care the most is the technology behind.

I am fine with BTC “distributed” database (blockchain, probably only cats haven’t heard about “blockchain”). Each node currently stores about 20G of transactions. It’s the same gigantic ledger for every one. Well it’s not the redundancy I would normally approve but whatever - it’s about money. “Storing money has to be expensive” - said banker.

Regardless to the market problems, do you know how your Bitcoin node connects to other nodes? I did not.

Meet Andrew - a software engineer. He is doing a lot of software engineering crap. Everyone likes him. He was a rockstar here and there. Recently, he took over the old project some other people abroad were working on for a few years. Everyone was saying that this project is a nightmare and people were quitting job because of it, but not Andrew. He was the right guy here.

— Shite, how shitty is this shitty code?! So much, so much, nananana - he was silently singing all the time reading that code. His behaviour wasn’t impressive, but people kept thinking he is a genius. Every weirdo has to be one. Unless not. Anyway, he hated that code, which had many nested ifs, not enough code coverage and, which was the worst thing in the Universe, integration tests that took ages every single time someone tried to run it.

Once he asked his manager to throw away the codebase. He would re-write it again. It would be better, shiny code that he and everyone else will understand. No doubts to it. His superior agreed, considering Andrew’s fame in the office, to get rid of the entire codebase and re-do the analysis phase, apparently missed or done in two minutes.

Software engineering accepts playing with other’s code. I struggled for a while before started doing it. I was doing it wrong though. It isn’t just the software your competition is writing. It is about all software products at all!

Now I am relaxing with Witcher 3 on my Xbox and that’s actually is fun. Don’t try to bother me, I am working now, fool!

Three years ago I wasn’t sure I am ready for remote work. Is it really as cool as some people describe?

It turns out it is!

I am sharing the 5 most important things every remote software engineer needs: seniority, trust, proactivity, security and writing. These are based on my personal, 3 years long experience of working from home for big companies and doing it well. This article is not meant to scare you about transitioning from office-based to remote work however it describes downsides of this form of software engineering.

So essentially I have overwritten the entire file I was working on yesterday!
That was 15 minutes of work, but recreate the same code without afterthoughts
I have done already in my would be almost impossible!

I was pissed off. My gf was like “you have to write it once again, not a
big deal”. I googled “how to undelete a file in linux”. It wasn’t a recipe that I
was looking for - it was only about files that were just removed, not
overwritten.

Spring is not the only solution for building web-based applications. There are few
alternatives to functions it’s delivering.

Spring is a heart of many web (but not only) projects. Most programmers
are like “start.spring.io is the only place where I kick off every project”.
Telling them they could work without it will end up with bruises and a loose
tooth.

But it’s not about why Spring is wrong. Is there any alternative to it? Why we
love it so much that nothing is good enough to use? Maciej Próchniak
presented yesterday at Confitura conference few alternatives to the most used
framework in the Web world. It is not a surprise since Maciej is a big fan of
OSGi and he mentioned it multiple times in previous talks. I was really looking
forward to his talk this year and I wasn’t disappointed at all.

Agencies. They are everywhere. If you have a Linkedin
account you know exactly what I am talking about. My incoming box reminds me of
Monty Python’s sketch. I get
plenty offers daily. Usually they are about working for companies that are
looking for specific client and project,
lol.

The existence of agencies is not bad at all. In fact, they might be really good
places to work, allowing specialist to do what he or she love to and securing
job position even for a years with many end-customers. In that case margin
agency earns is completely fair for both sides (worker and agency).

What is the bad agency then? How is it happening that people are unhappy
with job they have got? I can generalise few things that I have experienced
already. I hope that after reading this small blog post you would be able
to recognise patterns below and reject bad offers. Most of senior developers
are already familiar with these, although this might save years of shame for
inexperienced programmers. Wish you nice reading! :)